Community Meeting Point

Cas walked around in Athens and noticed a whole lot of abandoned buildings, which he mapped and photographed. He collected layers of colors, defined a shape typology based on the ruins and researched the definitions of neoclassical style. He concluded that graffiti and neoclassical style often go hand in hand: both are all over the city and the graffiti emerges on beautiful, but abandoned buildings from long ago. How could these places be rezoned for the communities that they’re in? Cas wanted to set up Community Meeting Points in the middle of these abandoned areas, to give back some sort of ownership to the people living around it. These community meeting points work as a symbolic element of the place, along with a tool to make group decisions. It is a step-wise system: people can say out loud what is bothering them or what kind of changes should be done. In the next step, they get to vote for the suggestion. To see people’s reaction, the voting pillar was placed on one of the squares in the circle. Cas asked them: ‘Should we build a children’s playground here?’Abandoned neoclassical building become meeting points for direct democracy and (graffiti) artists: it is a place where history and the present meet.